Continue the Conversation

Everything is interconnected, which is why I cannot try to isolate the books I read. I need to keep a dozen or so in process. I need to stop worrying about not finishing one or another: no more self-imposed rules, societal expectations, or pressures that exist mostly because I allow them. I will not be controlled, led to doubt, or pushed down paths I am not meant to travel.

Some of the best conversations in life take place among books and the reader willing to explore subjects that may seem to have nothing to do with one another. But that’s just an illusion. There is a commonality among the books I am reading: me. For one reason or another, no matter how these volumes came to rest in my hands, they become meaningful, and that is enough.

So, I will not send any back home to the shelves scattered about my house. In fact, I will likely persist in adding to the books I am reading and reviewing (starting with the ones I ordered on Tuesday).

It’s Not about Food will continue to surprise me (I think) with the ways in which it connects to all the Alice Miller books about childhood trauma I’ve read/am reading. When I come across, in Normandie and Roark’s book, a sentence like this: “Our world has forgotten how to listen and honor the feminine—the intuitive inherent wisdom of mother earth and our bodies,” I will recall Camille Paglia’s brilliant insights into archetypal understandings of man and woman, and I will remember why St. Augustine, who never really shed his Manichean ways, continues to make my blood boil.

When I read Brenda Ueland’s and Stephen Harrod Buhner’s and Ray Bradbury’s and Robert Bly’s exhortations to tap into my true self and write from that place, I will breathe a prayer of thanks for Alice Miller and Marie-France Hirigoyen, who helped me to finally understand that a lifetime of trying to be who anyone else wanted me to be left me not knowing who I was.

Every time Saul Azarian, in R.H. Snow’s Watcher of the Damned, has to stop and settle himself, regaining control over the emotions threatening to overwhelm him because he has finally found someone who cares enough to ask his name and why he can’t talk, I will think about the James Joyce story I read this morning and shake my head over how Mr. James Duffy, the main character, destroyed at least two lives because he refused to even acknowledge his emotions.

I will continue to let the verse in The Giant Book of Poetry feed me (body and soul, Augie), and I will follow Dorothy Day, through her diary entries, to the end of her life, reminding myself that there are as many ways to live a life as there are people in the world.